While the British are worried about that, two senior socialist Europeans are getting ready to manipulate the EU into imposing a new EU-wide tax as well. Here is what's up. The parties led by Werner Faymann, the chancellor of Austria, and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the leader of the German opposition -- and they aren't the two tax collectors at the left, but you get the drift -- have announced they intend to use the so-called 'citizens' initiative' clause of the Lisbon Treaty to push the EU into imposing an EU-wide tax on financial transactions. The 'initiative' is a stunt rigged up in the treaty to let people pretend they have some direct control over EU legislation. All it means is that if a million 'EU citizens' from a 'significant number' of member states sign a petition calling for new EU legislation, the European Commission will consider it. How much power will any 'citizen's initiative' have? Well, this socialist initiative will be the first to be attempted under Lisbon. But a couple of years ago when more than 1.2m people across Europe signed a petition to have the European Parliament sit in just one place, instead of running a travelling show between Strasbourg and Brussels, the European Parliament binned it. However, this push by the German and Austria socialists would be more welcome at the commission and parliament. First, it could be presented as punishment for the financial industry,so it would be easy to support. More, it would mean that the EU institutions would have an excuse -- 'democratic demand' -- to establish the precedent of such new taxes imposed directly from Brussels. So, an easy-to-swallow financial tax first, then a little trickier tax to follow. You'd think all the EU-lovers would be on board. But not quite. Some in Brussels are worried that the 'citizens' initiative' is being used by political parties in a way that was not intended by those who drafted Lisbon. It is supposed to prove the EU is in touch with its 'citizens.' But as the pro-EU Brussels newspaper European Voice puts it: 'The mechanism is supposed to give a voice to those who were lacking a voice. It should not be being hijacked by a head of government and an opposition leader who was until recently Germany's foreign minister... Was it for them that the citizens initiative was invented?' I don't see why not. The initiative is suspect, whoever uses it. What worries me more is that a grown-up newspaper like the European Voice could decide that the voters of Europe, all of whom live in representative parliamentary democracies, are 'lacking a voice.' That is one euro-myth too many. Lidington was on Radio 4's Today programme this morning. Evan Davis asked him about proposals from the Germans for EU treaty changes to strengthen Brussels control over the eurozone: would Britain have to have a referendum on such a treaty, even if it did not directly affect the United Kingdom? Which was just the right question from Davis, since before the election David Cameron promised that any new treaty giving the EU more powers would be put to a referendum. And since what the Germans want is to establish an EU economic government of the eurozone -- to which all EU countries are meant to belong eventually -- that is one huge power shift to Brussels. So the answer anyone could have expected from Cameron's new Europe Minister was, 'Yes, we will hold to our promise to give the people a referendum.' But that's not what we got. Here's what we all got instead: waffle, waffle waffle about 'no appetite in Europe for treaty change,' then '...if the British government were disposed to go along with a treaty change we have it written into the coalition agreement that any further treaty change which involved a transfer of power or competence to the European level would involve a referendum.' So was that a Yes? Which is to say, suppose it was a treaty creating huge new powers for Brussels over the eurozone, that changes the fiscal rules of the game, but did not directly affect Britain. Would the government still give the people a referendum on the treaty? All Evan Davies got from Lidington was: 'We'd have to see what the wording of any hypothetical treaty would be in order to make that judgement.' So the weaselling for which you need to be alert once Brussels produces the next treaty is this: the coalition will admit it is a new treaty and it does indeed involve a transfer of power to the European level, but they will insist it doesn't really involved a transfer of BRITISH power to the European level. Whatever the next treaty is, about the eurozone or not, the coalition will invent some notion that the treaty changes do not represent a genuine transfer of power. They will say the new treaty is 'merely an expansion of pre-existing shared power' or 'an expansion of intergovernmental agreements.' Therefore -- and will you be surprised? -- the coalition will not call a refendum. This is exactly the kind of dishonest playing with words that allowed Tony Blair to weasel out of giving Britain a referendum on the EU Constitution: he announced that since it had been re-designated a 'treaty' and not a 'constitution' (though the text was the same, only the title page was changed), then he didn't have to honour his pledge to hold a referendum. Yes, indeed, David Cameron is the new Tony Blair. Problem is, Nick Clegg is the new Tony Blair, too. It's all twice as bad. Conservatives have plenty of reason to grouse, but they haven't got the focus right on this latest Cameron betrayal. The Tory leader has known since last year -- though clearly he has kept quiet about it -- that the Lisbon Treaty removes the power of Parliament to get the guts of the Act out of British law. So Cameron's promises about scrapping the Act have been fraudulent since the moment he rolled over and admitted a future Tory government wouldn't fight to repeal Lisbon. Here is how it works. The Human Rights Act is the really just a 1998 Blairite mechanism to give the European Convention on Human Rights effect in British law. Before the Act, anyone who wanted a remedy under the convention had to go to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The reason Britain got caught up in the convention in the first place is because the United Kingdom was a founding member of the European Council, which is a loose grouping of countries started in 1949 which has always been separate from the grouping that has grown into the European Union. The European Convention on Human Rights was not a European Communities document, but any state joining what is now the EU has had to agree to abide by it. The Lisbon Treaty pushed that further, though. Virtually the whole of the European Convention on Human Rights was drafted as part two of Lisbon as the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. This charter sets out 'the rights of EU citizens' in the post-Lisbon Treaty EU. And do note that this charter in the Lisbon Treaty does not mean rights that you have as a British subject in a United Kingdom which belongs to the EU. The treaty creates a new entity, a new 'legal personality,' in effect a country called Europe, of which each and every British subject is now a citizen, whether he wants to be or not. (When you go through a European airport passport control desk now, the sign overhead saying 'EU Citizens' means what it says.) This charter is a Bill of Rights of that new creature, the 'EU citizen.' It is nothing but a slightly more interfering version of the thing the Blairite Human Rights Act inflicts on British subjects anyway. So even if the Act were repealed, the Treaty and its charter would still be there as a law superior to anything the British parliament might propose. Parliament can repeal the Act, but almost 100 percent of the guts of the Act would stay on in our law under the name of Charter of Fundamental Rights. Unless of course Cameron got Britain out of Lisbon. Chances of that: zero. So for Cameron ever to say he was going to lift the burden of the Act off the British people, but leave Lisbon in place, shows his promise to scrap the Act was always fake. As for his promise to bring in a British Bill of Rights in place of the Act -- another promise he has dumped -- I'm not sure dumping it is a bad thing. It's not that I object to an additional written Bill of Rights -- and I do mean 'additional.' Cameron seems to want everyone to forget Britain has had a Bill of Rights since 1689 ('An Act for Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject'). I expect he is worried about 'offending' Europe if he talks about the magnificent rights the British have had through all the generations of tyranny on the Continent. No, the problem is that I would not trust any government led by Cameron and Clegg to draft any Bill of Rights. The thing would just end up being a list of entitlements and a list of woolly aspirations, any of which could be interpreted any damned way by some 'judicial activist' judge. Another problem with drafting it now: any talk of a Bill of Rights sets off British people talking about the US Bill of Rights -- strictly speaking, the first ten amendments to the US Constitution. But given the phenomenal ignorance in Britain of just what those first ten amendments are, you really wouldn't want some grotesque parody of them established here. For a start, and this is a key point, the US Bill of Rights has almost nothing to do with guaranteeing rights to individuals. The reason the ten amendments were made to the newly-minted Constitution was to give belt-and-braces protection to the powers of the States against encroachment by the newly-established Federal government. The Constitution itself established that the only powers the US legislature, US chief executive and federal judiciary would have were strictly enumerated: all the tenth amendment did was repeat the principle that any powers not delegated to the United States -- in other words, to this new entity being created by the sovereign States -- remained absolutely with the States or with the people of the States. The other nine amendments drove the point home: most of them list of what the Congress cannot do to infringe the powers of the states. Only a few list the rights of an individual -- except of course they do establish the right to habeas corpus and protection against unreasonable search and seizure, which are fundamental. Omitting a great list of 'the rights of man' was no oversight. It was well understood that each individual State would protect the rights of each of its own citizens. No, the thing which is really sick-making is the eagerness, the enthusiasm with which they've done it. What has been revolting is the speed with which they have grabbed any excuse to dump every Conservative policy of resistance to ever-greater control of Britain by the EU institutions. It has become clear that every word of scepticism ever uttered by Cameron and Hague about the dangers posed to Britain by the EU was fake. They never meant any of it. The coalition negotiations with the loser-Lib-Dems didn't force them to surrender any of these policies -- it is clear now the Tory leadership couldn't hand them over fast enough. One policy they've dumped with shameless speed is the commitment that a new Tory-led government would repatriate the powers that were handed over to Brussels by Labour in the areas of social and employment laws, and criminal justice. Now all Cameron and Hague say they will do is 'examine the balance' of such powers Brussels now holds in these crucial areas. Which means nothing. Or rather, what it means is that they will fight to repatriate nothing. And if you ever thought maybe Hague was just a bit more sound on the issue than Clegg-think-a-like Cameron, an article just published under Hague's byline in an EU-establishment journal will show how wrong you are, and what a euro-luvie he is. The journal is called Europe's World, and if you want to know what it's like I think I can explain in just one line: Glenys Kinnock is on the editorial board. Part of the article reads like a cut-and-paste from EU propaganda: 'Europe has never been freer, more stable and more prosperous, and the European Union deserves considerable credit for that...' Actually, if Hague would look at the figures instead of the Brussels propaganda, he'd see that the EU has created the world's greatest bloc of economic sclerosis. As for 'freer,' you'd think a British Conservative might run down a list of a lot of things, from Nato to the British Army of the Rhine to Polish Solidarity's facing down of Communist power to Ronald Reagan's facing down of Soviet power, before he got to giving credit to the Brussels-centralising eurocrats and a load of unprincipled Continental politicians for making Europe 'freer.' Then he goes on to writing nothing but Lib-Dem guff: 'The Europe 2020 Strategy has an important role here. We need it to focus tightly and realistically on the areas where European action can add value,' writes Hague. I doubt you have ever heard of the 'Europe 2020 Strategy.' It's a plan put forward by the European Commission to have eurocrats direct the policies of individual member states ('collectively as a Union') to achieve 'a vision of Europe's social market economy for the 21st century.' What that means is if the member states will submit to direction by the Commission, then the EU will achieve 'high levels of employment, productivity and social cohesion.' Of course. Just like that. The commission, packed with professional bureaucrats who have never even run a corner shop, will lead the member states of the EU onward towards economic success. In the USSR, this was known as 'command economy.' It didn't work there, either. Then Hague wanders off into odd foreign policy corners, commenting on the Bosnian economy. But nowhere does he mention the most spectacular and potentially-deadly disaster in the history of the EU: the creation of the single currency, which is now threatening to pull a swathe of Mediterranean countries into sovereign debt default and leave banks all over Europe, but especially in France (they've got it coming) and Germany, holding hundreds of billions in bad debt. You know what I keep thinking? That Gordon Brown, despite his joining Tony Blair in the disgraceful behaviour in denying Britain a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, did at least find the backbone to keep Britain out of the euro. Judging by current form, I doubt Cameron or Hague would have shown the same spine. The leading European countries -- by which I mean of course those European countries which are leading their citizens to disaster in a discredited and disintegrated currency union, in other words, France and Germany -- intend to use the meeting to push through new regulations on hedge funds. Problem is, the regulations, in the way of EU regulations, are going to drive hedge funds out of EU countries and into places such as Switzerland, the Middle East and the Far East. Obviously this doesn't bother France and Germany because they don't have much in the way of hedge fund industries. But Britain does: 80 percent of hedge funds in the EU are based in the City, where they generate more than £5bn a year in tax revenue. Now, normally any regulations which would affect almost only one country, in this case the United Kingdom, would not be rushed through an ECOFIN meeting just minutes after a new British government has taken office. Normally an incoming government would be given time to study the form. Indeed, British diplomats have for days been telling their counterparts in Paris and Berlin that Osborne and his team need more time. 'Non' and 'Nein' were the replies to that one. Sarkozy and Merkel want the regulations pushed through, and they intend to take advantage of the new boy's inexperience to get what they want. Not that they need to push much. It has been clear since David Cameron and William Hague rolled over after the Lisbon Treaty was ratified last November that there was no desire among the Conservative leadership to fight to stop -- much less reverse -- the shift in powers from Westminster to Brussels. Cameron had promised the British people a referendum on Lisbon if and when he took office. He couldn't weasel out of the promise fast enough once the treaty was finally ratified. One of the things in the treaty that is so poisonous is its extension of qualified majority voting -- a means by which Britain loses its veto in dozens of new areas. One of these areas is in ECOFIN in votes such as the one which will be held tomorrow on hedge fund regulation. This is why Osborne has already let it be known he will have his arms up in surrender the moment he steps off the plane in the morning. He says he won't fight the proposal because he reckons he will be outvoted, so why bother fighting? Or as an unnamed source in the new government is saying: 'There is a majority in favour of the directive and we don't want to be in a position where we squander any negotiating capital we have for the future on an issue it doesn't appear we can win.' Really? Here is a fact. If you surrender before you even get into the negotiating room, you're right, you can't win. More to the point, negotiating capital is what you make it in any given situation. And the situation in Brussels at the moment is that Sarkozy has been shouting at Merkel that France will 'consider its position' in the single currency if she doesn't do as he says. That has been taken as a threat he would pull France out of the euro (gosh, and the papers reported that as though it would be a bad thing). Merkel has been capitulating to the French, making her fellow countrymen increasingly furious at her government's behaviour -- or as the largest-circulation German paper, Bild, splashed across its front page last week: 'We are once again the schmucks of Europe!' Three of the finance ministers at the negotiating table, including the one in the chair, Salgado of Spain,. are leading economies which are insolvent. Every minister in the room will be using all his fingers and toes to count up how much Greek gonna-default sovereign debt his own country's banks are holding (answer, in the case of France and Germany, vast billions). Every minister is worried that the eurozone crisis will throw all of the EU back into recession. In other words, if any real fighting chancellor walked into that ECOFIN meeting tomorrow, he would recognise that fate had given him an excellent position on the battlefield. Just let off a few live rounds of 'No, No, No,' All he has to do is say Britain won't accept the interference and if the other finance ministers don't like it, he will see them at the European Court of Justice and they can all talk about it there. The enemy would scatter in confusion: France and Germany and their allies are in no position to regroup and return fire, not until this eurozone mess is sorted. And that won't be for years. Unfortunately, British has no fighting chancellor. It has George Osborne. He's a Cameron Liberal Conservative. In other words, he won't fight.
21 May 2010
Look behind you
20 May 2010 4:03 PM
Weasel alert
Railroaded into 'rights'
19 May 2010 9:43 PM
Saturday, 22 May 2010
How useful for Europe that Cameron and Clegg are keeping the British distracted with all their plans for abandoning Tory-promised tax reforms and slapping on new LibDem taxes.
It's hard to keep up with all the weaselling by the new coalition, but here's a really greasy manoeuvre by the new Europe Minister, David Lidington.
So, grouse of the day for Conservatives is that David Cameron has dumped the Tory party commitment to scrap the Human Rights Act and replace it with a British Bill of Rights.
Unlike in Britain today, where the ghastly Human Rights Act twists the principle of 'rights' into 'privileges for criminals,' and HM's law-abiding subjects find their ancient rights have been swept aside.
The most revolting thing about the way Cameron and Hague have sold out the British to the European Union isn't that they've done it; though that is revolting enough.
Here is a picture of George Osborne, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his Treasury advisers finalising their negotiating position for their first meeting tomorrow at the EU council of finance ministers -- ECOFIN, in the jargon.
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